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Quality of Life: Play Here, Stay Here
The world’s No. 1 travel destination is also a great place to live.
Many of the assets that drive Florida’s tourism industry also provide business opportunities and growing markets for expanding companies. More importantly, those same assets provide year-round residents with an exceptional quality of life. The Florida lifestyle means different things to different people, but once you experience it, you’ll know why Florida is one of the most desirable places to live in the U.S.
Moving to Florida:
When David Gillespie wanted to find a corporate headquarters for his biofuels manufacturing company, he didn’t go it alone; he hired a relocation consultant to help. Together, they looked at more than 100 metropolitan areas nationwide and considered various attributes, including cost of living, housing, local talent and incentives. Gillespie also wanted a place where he and his employees would like to live.
“Florida outweighed the others in the scheme of things,” says Gillespie, president and CEO of New Generation Biofuels, which manufactures alternative biofuels from vegetable oils and animal fats.
Three Florida cities made Gillespie’s short list, but it was ultimately Lake Mary (population: 13,200) in Seminole County just north of Orlando that took the prize. Gillespie had visited the community previously on business, and he liked its feel. Apparently, so do a lot of other people. In 2007, Money magazine put Lake Mary in the No. 4 spot on its list of the “Top 100 Best Places to Live” in America.
Since New Generation Biofuels was founded in 2006 as H2Diesel, its employees have worked from sites across the U.S., including a manufacturing plant in Ohio.
“We’re a growing company, and we’ve had people all over the place in sort of a virtual organization,” Gillespie says. “But we’ve reached the scale in our development where it’s urgent to put people in the same place and develop critical mass. We haven’t really had a centralized corporate headquarters.”
So Lake Mary it is. Gillespie himself will relocate to Lake Mary from Houston, Texas, and bring in 25 other employees over the next three years, plus some other important people, too.
Initially, his children weren’t too crazy about leaving friends behind and moving to a whole new state. In the end, Gillespie managed to persuade them with three simple words: Walt Disney World. Gillespie and his children, ages 11 and 9, had already visited the resort 10 times.
“The only reason it’s not World War III at my house,” he says, “is because we’re moving to Florida.”
 From natural wonders to enthusiastic sports fans, Florida has it all. |
